Americans Detained in Egypt

Last week, Sam LaHood, head of the International Republican Institute—a group that advises on the logistics of democracy, with ties to prominent Republicans and backed by U.S. funds—was prevented from leaving Egypt. Nine other Americans were issued travel bans. Sam said that he presented his passport to the immigration officer at the airport. He was told to stand aside. A woman officer told him that he could not leave the country and she couldn’t tell him why. Something had twisted sharply in the tale. When his office was raided in December, police took everything: computers, documents, and “every stick of furniture, even book shelves,” he told me. The office has been sealed for the past six weeks. The American Embassy, furiously working the phones and high connections to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, was assured that everything would soon be given back. I talked to Sam this morning (he’s a friend): “Not a slip of paper has been returned,” he said.

The travel ban suggests that he may be arrested and put on trial. At this point, he said, nothing would surprise him. The story has been taken up in Washington, where Sam’s father, Ray LaHood, is the Secretary of Transportation in the Obama Administration. The President is said to have raised the issue in an hour-long phone call with Field Marshal Tantawi, head of SCAF, a few days ago.

What’s really going on here? It makes very little sense for the Army to provoke the American political establishment in this way. John McCain is chairman of I.R.I.; he’s also the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Egyptian Army receives $1.3 billion in American aid every year. And negotiations are ongoing for an I.M.F. loan and other large financial infills that Egypt desperately needs as its economy approaches a cliff: the Egyptian pound is expected to devalue within weeks, the budget has a giant hole in it, and the latest issue of government bonds had an embarrassingly small uptake.

I asked Sam what he thought was behind the whole thing. He sighed and said, “That’s above my pay grade. I feel like there are a lot of suspicions, a hundred different theories as to what’s behind it. It’s very difficult to inject any logic or rationale into the situation.”

The back story is that the American government has been funding many projects in Egypt, some civil-society programs, some direct aid for projects like water, sanitation, and health. The sum amounts to several hundred million dollars. Before the revolution this was all processed through the Egyptian Ministry of International Coöperation, run by Faiza Abu Naga, a holdover from the Mubarak era who has managed to survive several cabinet shakeups before and after the revolution. After the revolution the Americans began giving money directly to the N.G.O.s on the ground. Sam admits that when this started to happen, he knew it would anger elements in the Egyptian government. “It didn’t really matter what the money went for,” he said. “It just wasn’t going through their bank accounts.”

“It’s complicated,” he added. “There are many levels to it.” Several times in Egypt, digging into a story that doesn’t seem to make any sense, I have become quickly enmeshed in a web. It is impossible to separate the strands of corruption and government fiefdom from subsidy and bureaucracy, personal relationships, inefficiency, and the theory of fuck-up.

The story of Sam LaHood may well be tangled up in power plays between Faiza Abu Naga and the General Prosecutor’s Office, which started the investigations and which likes to fancy itself as an independent body not beholden to political considerations. How these two forces balance against the executive control of SCAF is nigh impossible to discern. Sam doesn’t have any idea why he is caught up in it. His lawyers have told him that it is a political case, ultimately some sort of dispute between the Egyptian and the U.S. governments. But it’s very unclear who or what the Egyptian government is during this interim period. There exists an overarching effort to intimidate and minimize the liberals—Sam pointed out that more than three hundred organizations are currently under investigation—but within that there are curious twists that don’t add up to what could be called counterrevolution strategy. There has been no institutional reform in Egypt yet; it is a country still wracked by individual and nefarious forces. It’s worth remembering that much of the time, things don’t add up to a clear picture.

Sam LaHood, left, with his father Ray in 2009. AP Photo/Transportation Department, File.